OCCK & Second-Hand Smoke

OCCK (Oakland County Child Killer) & Second-Hand Smoke: A Somewhat Hazy Autobiographical Sketch Pad



Silent child, with a quiet heart...

Nurtured by the heart
of old rivers,
where childhood dreams
foster an impure connection
to the tangible world--
If only for an hour
of make-believe,
to make the world
seem sane again...

"February 15, 1976: the body of Mark Stebbins, a twelve year old from the city of Ferndale, was found in a snow bank near Ten Mile Road. He had been strangled, and there was evidence that he had been molested. Police in the area"...

"Do you still believe in monsters?" He asked, as we sat in our imperfect hideaway, and smoked our parents' cigarettes; as I stared down below, trying to peer into the dark river water at its depths, where the ice and cold could not hold sway over its perpetual motion.

There was no urge to be cool, as it was just he and I. There wasn't any point to lie to ourselves, nor one another, as we both knew too much about one another to even bother. We had learned to communicate, without words, those things that we just as soon would prefer not to admit out loud.

"I ever tell you about the dream I had, where a Tyrannosaurus Rex came a gaping down on your house over the trees, with some obvious ill-intent in its eye?"

"Not today," he grinned, and then tried to form smoke-rings by the shaping of his lips.

It was not really what I wanted to talk about anyway.

"You hear about that Stebbins kid?"

"No," a mild curl in his brow, before he glanced over at where I sat on the opposite side of the shack. We had both laughed at how over-protective my mother was, when it wasn't a major pain in one and/or both of our asses.

There was seemingly only so much adventure to be had within such a confined space, and I never really understood what she was really afraid of, until...

"I guess they found his body in a snowbank. Who'd want to kill a kid?"

"Depends on the kid, I suspect." He said, as I rolled my eyes.

Ferndale was miles away from us, though it was still in Oakland County.

Into what depths
he would descend
to convince himself,
that if for nothing
else, good and evil
had a purpose--
more than merely
agitate the atoms
in a stir
of little ripples
that rose up
to the surface world
from down below,
into the bottoms
of the river-bed

... "December 22, 1976: the body of Jill Robinson, from Royal Oak Michigan, was found in the snow"...

"That's just plain horrible." It was my mother's voice, in our old living room, though she wasn't speaking to me, and may have wished that I did not overhear the news report.

I could not explain why I had not forgotten all about Mark Stebbins, as I was normally prone. It was not as if I had truly made any connection between the two so much as I thought about him when I heard about the girl... where the only thing in common really were that they were both found in the snow.

The term serial killer had yet to come into common usage, and there was no reason, at the time, to suspect that one had anything to do with the other.

Why anyone would want to kill a child never really clicked, as they could not possibly have anything that a person could want. Speaking, mostly from firsthand experience, children were powerless creatures that were merely trying to figure out what it meant to be human.

In the seventies, we had more than a few poor examples; such as the Manson Family and the Son Of Sam-- one in California, and one in New York. For a ten year old kid, they may just as well happened on another planet. The idea that children were dying in my own hometown county, both of them near my own age, was still too surreal.

When there is blood
in the snow,
you can normally follow
the track
to find what it is
that has been wounded.
Snow makes it easier
to follow,
and you can almost
bet that whatever
it is
that you are tracking
is probably dying.

... "January 26, 1977: Kimberly Mihelich, 10, from the town of Berkley was last seen at a local 7-11 on Twelve Mile Road. Her body was found by a local mail carrier, placed in the snow near Big Beaver Road (16 Mile) in Troy Michigan"...  

"You see that crazy shit on the news man?" He was excited, as if it were like Christmas morning. I didn't need to be told to know exactly what he was talking about so much as I wondered that his mood seemed so out of place.

"You mean about the girl?" Playing stupid, as we walked to school together through the open field that led to the back of the school, would normally have been just another day. It wasn't like that anymore, as the woods that I had known since I was old enough to walk suddenly seemed darker and more foreboding.

"Yeah man! They found her stiff right down the damn street"...

"I know," I overspoke him, as I did not really want to talk about it. To be honest, I was not even really certain why he cared so much about it; though to be even more honest, deep down inside, I knew.

"They said that he didn't do any poking on her, or nothing like that. They are saying that they think the other two cases are linked. Dude, the creeper is a fucking queer. The girls he didn't even mess with, but the boy..."

Now, for a kid of that age and time, that had only recently discovered the wonders of Playboy magazine, but really didn't offer much insight as to what to do should you ever come across a naked woman (save perhaps if you actually read it, which we obviously did not)-- which, for the record was something of an issue. There was this girl I had known pretty much since birth that like to play this game, which inevitably lent to one or the other of us with our pants coming down; and more often both, though never at the same time. Let's just say it became part of our repertoire for a time, though with nothing more on either side than the idle-wile curiosity.

Which in this particular instance, as I kind of liked to play that game, though I could not entirely explain why, at the time, kind of made me wonder that I might be a creeper too-- even if it was her idea that started all that busy-ness.  I mean, I knew in general that it was kind of wrong, as we both took some pains to try not getting caught, literally, with our pants down.

"Where'd you hear that word from?" Just by the way Mama had looked at me, I knew that I had done something wrong. I didn't know what it was yet, so rather than pony-up my best friend, I blamed it on some kids form school-- which was not entirely a lie, as he went to my school too.

"Well, it's not a right thing to say, and it is even less of a right thing to do. You just put it out of your mind, and go on and be a good boy"...

"It's where they put their thing in your butt Stupid." I blinked incredulously.

"Huh?"

"Cause it feels good... to a queer I guess," he said, and then rolled his eyes at me. "Son, you don't know shit."

"I don't know about that shit... Well, unless what you're telling me is just a bunch of shit, I suppose I might know something about that now too."

"I'll swear it on a whole stack of Bibles, though it don't seem a right way of going about explaining that sort of thing." He said, and then held out a pack of smokes, as he shook one out at me. "Bible says it isn't right," he said and then lit his cigarette.

Objects may be closer
than they appear,
as the de-magnifying lens
drew deep into--
from the world behind;
and the green nature
of innocence becomes
subdued by the limits
of the eye to see past
where you are now

... "March 22, 1977: The body of eleven year old Timothy King was found in a shallow ditch near Gill Road, in southern Oakland County. Police officials declined to offer any official statements; but an unofficial source, that chose to remain unnamed, did offer that the body was found clothed, though there was some evidence of abuse, and that the boy had been suffocated"...

I watched the face of the man as he pled against an unreasoning force, as only a few short days ago he had begged the person who had taken his son to return him back to him, unharmed.

This only seemed to make it all worse. It was not how things were supposed to be, and the depraved indifference of the offender had offended me more than the fear of unknowable.

I believed that he should die.

I believed that he should never have been at all.

I knew why.

Four children were gone forever.

I believed that they shouldn't be dead.

I believed that they should never have been touched in such a harmful way.

I had watched their parents grieve the loss.

I still didn't understand why...

"You hear about those three guys that beat the hell out of that faggot?" He said, as we reclined back onto the inner-tubes, and floated down the river on a summer Saturday afternoon.

"No," I answered, as I inexplicably wanted a cigarette.

"Hell yeah man, they tore his sissy ass up."

"What for?"

"For being a god damn queer, that's what for." He said, angrily.

"Oh," I said and laid back as that dark river carried me further and farther away.

Uley